Defying the Speed of Light: Wire-Exposed Architectures and Spatially-Aware Compilers

As wire-delay is becoming the most important design constraint of microprocessors, wire-expose architectures are emerging as a strong solution to maintaining the performance growth of modern processors. However, a von Neumann programming model cannot harness the power of these machines. We have developed StreamIt, a novel language as a viable common machine language for wire-exposed architectures. It abstracts away the target's granularity, memory layout, and network interconnect, while capturing the notion of replicated processors that communicate in regular patterns. With this representation, we believe that the StreamIt compiler will match the performance of C code that was hand-tailored for a given grid-based machine.